Visual Aids
Those of us who have to spend hours watching our MLAs read their speeches from prepared texts long for the moment when a politician tries something new. But when John O'Dowd tried to jazz up his contribution to this evening's debate on a recent Republican parade in Belfast he was ruled out of order.
The Sinn Fein MLA wanted to know why unionists were devoting a debate to a parade which was peaceful (despite the brandishing by some fake British soldiers of replica guns) when they could have debated real loyalist violence in Carrickfergus, Bangor and elsewhere. To punctuate his points he produced print outs of the relevant BBC News Online stories and screwed them up throwing them to the floor.
The Ulster Unionist Danny Kennedy objected that this was "chamber theatre" (presumably a play on the "street theatre" defence the parade organisers mounted for the replica guns). The Speaker Willie Hay concurred and ruled that MLAs could not resort to such "visual aids".
So it's back to reading parrot fashion from prepared texts then...
I'm 
